Fully Baked #41: Gifting Platform

💡 An idea to buy your way onto a prospect’s desk

🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found

🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product

🤑 What the unit economics look like

⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks

❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea?

Most B2B marketing gets ignored. Companies spend a fortune on agencies, bought lists, events and ads, and cold email reply rates have dropped to about 3.4%.

Something physical on someone's desk still gets noticed. Direct mail pulls a 4.4% response rate according to the ANA, compared with 0.12% for email. The trouble is doing it at scale. Someone has to track down addresses, choose gifts, write the notes, pack the boxes, ship them and then remember to follow up. Here's the idea.

Build Sendry, a gifting platform that runs the whole campaign for sales and marketing teams, with AI doing the legwork.

Connect your CRM and it picks out your best prospects, finds their addresses, reads up on them (a recent promotion, what they post on LinkedIn, what they do at weekends) and suggests a gift they'll actually like.

Then it takes care of the note, the packing, the delivery and the follow-up, and logs it all back in the CRM.

Corporate gifting in the US was forecast to be worth $312 billion in 2025. That sounds huge, but most of it is companies thanking their own staff and clients. Sending gifts to win new business is a much smaller pot.

It's also pricey. One benchmark puts it at one to three meetings for every 100 gifts sent. With a $300 gift, each meeting costs somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. You'd need to be selling very big contracts for that to make sense.

However, the money might have already been and gone. Sendoso raised more than $152 million, including $100 million from SoftBank in 2021, when everyone was working from home and posting gifts to each other. By late 2023 it was on its fourth round of layoffs. Interesting…

By email: we pitched a simpler version of the idea. You pick the accounts, each prospect chooses their own gift from a link, and the addresses, shipping and tracking are handled for you. Then we asked: "Has a gift ever actually booked you a meeting?" We sent 404 of these. 3 people replied.

On LinkedIn: We told people we were looking into whether gifting really books meetings, and asked if they'd share what they'd seen work in their own pipeline. 50 people accepted our connection request. 1 replied.

All 4 replies asked for more details. Nobody told us a gift had booked them a meeting, and nobody asked to try it.

Go after B2B software companies with big contracts ($50,000 or more) and a proper outbound team. They're the only ones who can justify the cost per meeting. Offer to run a 50-gift campaign at cost, then compare the meetings it books with what their cold emails get.

Talk to founders who still do their own outbound and the RevOps people stuck sending gifts by hand. Something like: "Give us the list. We'll send the gifts and tell you who bit."

Gift your own prospects. If it works, every box you send doubles as a sales pitch.

Get inside the tools sales teams already use, like HubSpot, Outreach and Salesloft, so gifting becomes another step in a sequence instead of one more platform someone has to sign off on.

Platform fee: $1,000 a month. This covers picking prospects, finding addresses, suggesting gifts and syncing with the CRM. That's somewhere in the middle: Reachdesk starts at $20,000 a year, while Goody and Snappy let you start for free.

Gift fee: 15% on top of whatever the gifts cost. This is where most of the money comes from. It pays for sourcing, the handwritten notes, packing and delivery.

One customer for one month (illustrative): 100 gifts at $100 each is $10,000 of gifts, so $1,500 in fees. With the $1,000 platform fee, that's $2,500 coming in. Notes, packing and postage cost roughly $800, address and data lookups about $150, and support and software another $200. You're left with around $1,350, or 54%.

One customer for a year (illustrative): about $16,200, as long as they keep sending every month.

Target CAC: under $8,000 if you want your money back within six months. That's doable for a B2B product sold by a sales team, provided customers don't cut their gifting budget halfway through the year.

Sendoso ($152M+ raised, now owns Alyce and Postal): The biggest name in gifting. It now has AI gift picking through Alyce and a cheaper self-serve version through Postal. It bought its two closest rivals and still had to make cuts, which tells you how tough this market is.

Reachdesk (from $20,000 a year): Built for big companies, it plugs into Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach and Salesloft and ships to more than 150 countries. Those integrations would take a new startup years to match.

Goody ($32M+ raised) and Snappy (both free to start): The person receiving the gift chooses what they want and types in their own address, which gets rid of the most annoying part of the job. And you can’t undercut free.

Sincerely ($250 a month): Writes the notes for you using your CRM data, and a person checks each one before it goes out. It’s basically the AI part of our pitch, at a quarter of the price we’d want to charge.

You could argue nobody has built the fully automated, AI-first version yet. But every piece of it already exists somewhere, usually inside a company with a lot more money than you. And when the biggest player in a market is buying its rivals rather than growing, that's not a gap we'd want to jump into.

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